#27 Travelogue

A holiday is your real life, too

Where have I been? I was (a while ago now) in sunny Europe for two whole months! Only to return to winter in Melbourne, and my 9-5 job and a special kind of flatness that comes with knowing you could be standing in impossibly blue water on an Adriatic beach, but you aren’t.

I’m sorry I didn’t tell any of you I was going and that I wouldn’t be writing for so long, the truth is, it happened kind of organically.
Travelling just felt like a time to consume; to drink it all in, to read, to spend whole days staring up at painted church ceilings, to eat glistening prawns even though I claim to be a vegan and to wonder about all the possible paths I could take when I get home.
And then I got home, and now I’ve shaken my life into a little champagne bottle across the bow of a boat explosion; a new job, moving out of my flat and a feeling of where to next (?).

It’s been a month since I got back, and I’ve barely thought about the trip since. There’s a weird reflective fatigue I’ve had. People ask, “how was it?” and I say, “it was amazing!” because of course it was. But no pithy exchange can really convey the sensory tapestry you yourself experience in places you’ve never been before. It’s like when you’re feeling sad and someone asks you how you are, you could tell them the exhaustive and exhausting truth, or you could just say “good thanks”.  

Today’s edition is kind of a musing on travel, or maybe it’s about a subject I come back to often; the reality of life, versus the fantasy of it.

Either way, it’s my fumbling re-entry to SIL.   

Love you, love,

Belle (a broken record) x

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Perhaps it was when, only 3 days into my two-month euro trip, I projectile vomited into my hands in the middle of a sunny, packed-out park in Brighton. I knelt down next to a little garden bed filled with pink and blue meadow flowers, middle aged people with freshly shorn doodle dogs walked by me and looked down at me, not with pity or concern but with elegant disinterest.
So British.
I wiped the vomit from my face with a brand-new white shirt which I internally and immediately mourned. Bile acid stung my eye, and my hands shook.

I would vomit in this diabolical way 5 more times, in some of the most disgusting public toilets I’ve ever seen (2 of them on trains). Liam next to me, white as a sheet and sweating, also destined to vomit in a variety of public places.

Perhaps that was the moment I relearned the truth, that travelling is also just life too, sometimes the worst parts of it.

It’s easy to see a holiday as an alternate reality, where some other muted, faded, bleached, brined version of you moves through the world without any friction. But really, it’s just you, with your same weird anxieties. You’re not staring blankly at your outlook inbox, but you are vomiting in public.

In times like this, I’m often struck by the difference between knowing something in theory and knowing something actually, like in your body, a felt truth.
It’s a somewhat random correlation, but when I think about that, I think about a quote my very brilliant high school history teacher once shared about communism, “it is a diamond on the horizon and a tear in the eye.” I’ve googled that quote countless times since high school and I’ve never been able to find a source for it, but I’m pretty sure this same history teacher reads this newsletter (hi TR!) so he can let me know if I’ve misremembered it.

Whether manufactured or misremembered, I think about those words not in relation to communism, but in relation to lots of things that seem smooth and porcelain perfect as a concept but are different when they collide with the present. Like travel, moving cities or a new love. The setting is different but you are still you.

Call me stuck on a loop but I do find that particular phenomenon of the human mind incredibly interesting and I lived it for real in a cold sweat on the London tube.

Me in Montenegro, where I spent a bunch of time feeling anxious!

Of course, I know that in talking about what travelling does not give you (a different personality or a perfect experience of life), I probably seem very Veruca Salt in my summation of what it is to be on trains and sidewalks in places where they don’t speak your language. And I hate that, because of course it’s a true thrill and absolute privilege. Especially after lockdown in Melbourne, where venturing out for a coffee felt like the brand new future of international travel.

It’s a heart blooming joy to eat chewy pasta and walk around streets that hardly seem real. The edges of everything warped by the unreality of never having seen anything quite like that architecture, boxy or peak roofed or laden with terracotta tiles. Or the words on that shopfront, the way those letters are arranged, makes your mouth move like you’re talking around a pearl. What do the letters add up to? The handsaws glinting in the window suggest it’s probably a hardware store.

The smells and tastes and the look of the people, high cheek-bones and punky expressions. The flowers that bloom in a profusion of bright blue on the side of the road, sold for $30 a bunch back home. The old, old buildings, the gelato you eat like a golden retriever in the shade of an acorn tree, the beer you drink at 11am because it’s hot and you’re on holidays.

And then at some point, you arrive at a pebbled coast and you are shocked by the glistening beauty of a blue sea that is so clear you can see an urchin’s wicked little shadow. Three hours later you’re drinking wine on a medieval wall, where cliffs drop into that same endless blue and the only thing you’d change is to mute the Australian backpackers who keep loudly declaring that their friend “is such a main character” because she did a swan dive.

Lime in the Adriatic.

There’s an illustration on the toilet door in a friend’s house, a thing to look at while you pee (if you sit when you do that). It’s an illustration by artist Gorkie and it’s kind of like a graph, with 4 options.
Option A is a horizontal line, long and perfectly straight, option B is a line like an electrocardiogram on a lie detector test, with big ups and big downs. Option C is a diagonal line, perpetually going up and D is the opposite of that, perpetually going down.
The words at the top of this illustration say, “pick a life”.

According to our friends, the anecdotal data is in, everyone picks B.
Bigs ups and big downs.

And you know, it’s the B life for me too.
Here I am, thankful that life continues to serve realness in all its flavours, sweetness, hardship, confusion and sucker punches of beauty.